Friday, April 5, 2019

FRC Announcement: (More) Evidence that Sexual Orientation Can Change

I received this statement from a research at the Family Research Council.

It's conclusions are notable yet commonplace, considering the fact more people have known, and most people have recognized, that people are NOT born gay, and the fact is that more people are finding that they can leave homosexual conduct without too much trouble.

The truth is that the whole LGBT Movement is nothing more than cultural Marxism, looking for any means possible to destroy the moral fabric of the United States and undermine the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness which makes America Great!

I will add a few counterpoints to the general statements provided below:

1. There is no such thing as "sexual orientation".
2. There really is no such thing as "a homosexual", since every human being has a fallen nature in need of redemption.
3. There is no such thing as "sexual identity."
4. I think we should stop talking about "homosexual tendencies" and simply refer to these fleshly leanings as "same-sex desires".

That's what this young man did when he final "came out" -- then came home!

Here's the full report:

I wanted to let everyone on this list know about a new paper of mine just published by Family Research Council last month. It is titled Evidence Shows Sexual Orientation Can Change: Debunking the Myth of “Immutability.”

Triggered by a question from a couple of people via email (one of whom was Stephen Black—thank you, Stephen!) about how many “ex-gays” there actually are, I began digging a little more deeply into the question of the evidence showing that sexual orientation can change. I am NOT talking about studies regarding outcomes of “sexual orientation change efforts,” per se (I wrote about that last September; see https://www.frc.org/issueanalysis/are-sexual-orientation-change-efforts-soce-effective-are-they-harmful-what-the-evidence-shows). Rather, I am talking about longitudinal surveys (of the same people over long periods of time) with questions about people’s sexuality. They clearly show that all of the elements of sexual orientation—attractions, behavior, and identity—are subject to change over time (but homosexuals are MORE likely to change than heterosexuals).

In the paper I quote extensively from the 2016 paper on “Scrutinizing Immutability” by (lesbian) researcher Lisa Diamond (famous for her work on “sexual fluidity” among women) and Clifford Rosky. But I obtained copies of 6 journal articles based on these four large data bases, and did my own analysis (to the limits of my statistical ability) of them as well.

I am going ahead and attaching the PDF of the full paper (22 pages long); but you can also obtain it online here:
with the PDF here:

(I should say that the paper does not actually answer the question of how many ex-gays there are, but only that they clearly exist! Maybe I will work on that next).

I will put the Executive Summary below.

Peter Sprigg
Senior Fellow for Policy Studies
Family Research Council
Washington, D.C.

Executive Summary

Many of the advances of the homosexual movement have been based on the claim that sexual orientation is “immutable.” For example, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the 2015 Supreme Court case that redefined marriage to include same-sex couples rested upon that assertion. Key policy issues still being debated in which the supposed “immutability” of sexual orientation can be an issue include efforts by LGB activists to expand non-discrimination laws to protect sexual orientation (such as the proposed federal “Equality Act”), and efforts to restrict or ban sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE), sometimes called “conversion therapy.”

The concept of “sexual orientation” is multi-faceted, involving a combination of attractions, behaviors, and personal identity. Changes in any of these elements (sometimes called “sexual fluidity”), and a lack of “stability” or “exclusivity” in or among them, represents evidence that sexual orientation can change. This paper reports results from four large data sets reflecting longitudinal analysis of the same individuals over time in population-based samples (three from the United States and one from New Zealand). All demonstrate that significant change in each of the elements of sexual orientation is possible. The percentage changing from homosexuality to heterosexuality ranged from 13% to 53%, while the percentage changing from heterosexuality to homosexuality ranged only from 1% to 12%. This suggests that heterosexuality is largely stable but homosexuality is not. In one survey of “same-sex attracted respondents,” up to 38% of men and 53% of women “changed to heterosexuality” in only a six-year period.

FRC endorses the call by pro-LGB scholars Lisa Diamond and Clifford Rosky to “abandon the immutability argument once and for all.” Diamond, Rosky, and others on the Left argue that a belief in personal freedom should be sufficient support for pro-homosexual policies. However, this amounts to substituting the principles of the sexual revolution for the principles of the civil rights movement. The public would be wise to question instead whether the goals of the homosexual movement can be justified at all.

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